Great men wait for the right moment to abandon caution. The rest of us abandon it when impatience becomes too much for us.
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
The shades of respectability begin to close about the greying head.
Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky.
Wisdom is founded on memory; happiness on forgetfulness.
Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here?
The desire to perform impedes conversation.
Most bad luck is the misfortune of not being an exception.
The rich are never as possessed by their riches as the poor are by their poverty.
Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.
I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.
Even boredom has its crises.
Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.
Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.
Both faith and cynicism make judgment too easy.
If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world.
Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.
Lovers do all the talking and writing. What are the Beloveds thinking?
Errors are more numerous than truths, but fortunately too divided among themselves to take power.
A laughing Lear would be monstrous. Not so a laughing Romeo and Juliet.
The lazy manage to keep up with the earth's rotation just as well as the industrious.
Eccentricity gives misfits a way of fitting in.
Every seeming equality conceals a hierarchy.
Prudence does not make people happy; it merely deprives them of the excitement of being constantly in trouble.
Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.
